An Electric Car Test Drive—In 2020

With the Nissan Leaf, the Chevy Volt and other plug-in cars entering the market, potential buyers wonder: How will recharging stations work? What will a "fill up" cost? To answer those questions, we talked to dozens of experts and spent a day with a hypothetical EV driver from the future.

Santa Monica, California, 12 AM, August 4, 2020. At midnight, your car wakes up. The hefty, 15-pound charging cable tethering the front of the vehicle to a 220-volt outlet in your garage goes live, pulling 5 kilowatts of power from the grid. In just 5 hours, it will nearly double your home's average daily electrical consumption. Across California, hundreds of thousands of plug-in hybrids and pure electric vehicles are doing the same, sipping electricity from a power network at rest. Some of those vehicles have different charging regimens, communicating more with the local utility, or even allowing that utility to actively control when and how to recharge their batteries. But yours follows a simple pricing scheme, automatically charging during what is typically the cheapest time of the day, between midnight and 5 am. That's when the utilities have power to spare, when the office buildings in downtown Los Angeles have gone dark and sweltering. In the daily rhythm of the grid, this is off-peak.

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Tonight, though, the off-peak grid is unusually busy. Air conditioners across Southern California are battling a week-long heat wave, with temperatures exceeding 100 F during the day and barely easing up at night. So far, it's the worst heat wave to hit the region since 2006. The forecast for today shows no signs of a break: Angelenos can expect afternoon highs of 103 F. Aug. 4 is shaping up to be one of the first real tests of the so-called smart grid, an effort to create a nimbler, more efficient, less vulnerable electrical grid. It will also test the nearly 500,000 electrified vehicles in the state.

The push to make plug-in vehicles a key part of America's automotive mix began in earnest back in 2010, when the Chevy Volt and Nissan Leaf were poised to hum into dealerships. That same year, strict new mileage standards forced carmakers to begin developing petroleum-free methods to power portions of their fleets. But vehicles were only one part of the equation--what would happen, exactly, when people plugged them in? What would it cost to recharge on the road? And would an aging, weather-vulnerable electrical grid be able to safely charge thousands, even millions, of the most power-hungry consumer products in history?

In the summer of 2020, the answers to many of these questions are becoming clear (PM interviewed over two dozen engineers, analysts and other experts to create this hypothetical scenario): By this time the U.S. electrified vehicle fleet has reached 2 million. It's a number that's seen as either a minor triumph or a total disaster--higher than some analysts had estimated, but short of the 14 million that companies like Nissan had predicted, accounting for less than 1 percent of the national fleet (a smaller market share than even diesel).

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Half are plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs), with lithium-ion battery packs that provide 40 or 50 miles of electric range, and liquid-fuel engines that kick in for longer trips. These are most popular in suburbs, rural communities and colder states. The other million or so vehicles are called simply EVs, or electric vehicles. With larger battery packs that can run for 100 miles or more between charges and no backup gas engine, they tend to be used by residents of cities and warmer climates. Collectively, these various types of electrified vehicles are called grid-enabled vehicles, or GEVs, because unlike early gas--electric hybrids, the grid--not just the brakes or the motor--provides their batteries with a full charge. Thanks in part to zero-emissions vehicle mandates dating back decades, California has attracted the bulk of this new market, meeting analysts' predictions of a 25 percent share.

California is also where most GEV-relateds startups have flourished or failed, populating neighborhoods, shopping malls and the occasional highway rest stop with charging stations. These come in three varieties. Level 1, or 110-volt chargers, can take 12 hours or longer to refill a vehicle's battery and are mainly found in the garages of PHEV owners and in some public parking lots. Level 2, or 220-volt chargers, are the most common. They can replenish a drained battery in 4 to 5 hours or top off a partially depleted EV parked at a Target, Best Buy, or a growing number of workplace lots. And then there are Level 3 chargers, known as fast chargers, 440-volt stations that can get some batteries back to 80 percent in 15 to 20 minutes, but they generally are in remote locations and their surcharge rivals gas prices.

Not that you pay much attention to gas prices anymore. There's a 2014-model-year internal-combustion sedan parked next to your EV, but that's for driving up to San Francisco, out to Vegas, or for the occasional camping trip. Instead, you keep your eye on electricity rates, which have climbed as utilities scramble to meet demand that's growing by 1 percent every year, despite more energy-efficient appliances and unpopular restrictions on the size of flat-screen TVs. Still, by triggering your Level 2 charger to run at night and grabbing one of the free charging spots at work, running your EV costs about a dollar per day. The cost of installing that charger--about $1000, with the utility covering half--was recovered in the first year. The switch from hydrocarbons to electrons has been, for you, a bargain.

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At 7:45 AM, your car's air conditioning comes on. Instead of drawing power from the battery during driving, which would reduce your effective range, the EV sips electricity from the grid to precondition the cabin. An hour later, when you plug your phone into the center console, a touchscreen display lists your favorite radio stations and your estimated time of arrival--adjusting for traffic and weather conditions--at the office. In an EV, where built-in devices like satellite radios and CD changers only add cost and range-reducing weight, offloading as many amenities as possible onto the driver's handheld device is a smarter, more efficient design decision. "Instead of a bunch of old geezers like me wondering what the kids like, we'll just leave the architecture open, and let them run everything through their iPhone," says Bill Reinert, national manager of Toyota's Advanced Technology Group.

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There are some gadgets still hard-wired into the car, such as a GPS system that displays public chargers and maps out routes that maximize your battery range. Today, you opt for the quickest path to work, and instead of sweating out the last miles as the sun starts to bake your preconditioned cabin, you crank the a/c. There are five Level 2 charging spots at work, and only seven employees with GEVs. You're bound to beat them there. Sure enough, when your car glides into the parking lot emitting a high-pitched whine--one of countless downloadable car tones, required by law to reduce the risk of collisions with pedestrians--all of the chargers are free. You pull the spare Level 2 charging cable out of the trunk, plug in and check the station's LCD display. Battery: Sixty-two percent. Time to charge: N/A. That's not normal. Neither is the alert window, apologizing for the inconvenience, explaining that your company's chargers have been temporarily disabled to assist the local utility's load management.

This, it hits you, is how the smart grid begins to fail--not with a bang or a brownout, but a million polite refusals.

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On a national scale, the grid barely registers a couple of million electric vehicles. The Department of Energy predicts a 0.1 percent increase in overall electricity demand per million plug-ins. Other experts see no more than a 1 percent bump by 2020. Even if 2 million EVs were all plugged into Level 2 chargers, that might constitute roughly the same demand as 2 million new homes suddenly appearing on the grid. Spread out across the country, that's a negligible increase.

Unfortunately, the grid lives and dies on a local level--there is no central operator that juggles the peaks and valleys of supply and demand around the United States. That's why the heat storm (a longer, more severe version of a heat wave) that hit California in 2006 led to major power failures. By 2020, national electrical demand will be even higher, rising by around 14 percent. For years, utilities have struck deals with customers to help shave peak loads. Southern California Edison, for example, gives customers a credit in exchange for allowing the utility to wirelessly shut down their air conditioner's compressor. Whether it's referred to as load control or stop-charging, the ability of utilities to pull the plug on GEVs is seen as a natural extension of this practice. The digital, two-way communication associated with the smart grid would make it easier, but it isn't necessary--researchers at the Electric Power Research Institute are currently testing load control with Ford and GM vehicles using wireless signals, as well as GM's OnStar system.

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In 2020, not every GEV driver is going to be talked into giving utilities final charging approval. PHEV owners might be more willing--they can always run on gas, if necessary. Commercial customers might also be game, since the charging spots they've paid for are essentially perks.

Which leaves you in a bind. Today, along with being the hottest day of the year, is your annual scheduled dealer maintenance visit. The dealership is 20 miles away. It's just past noon now. Unless your company's chargers are online when you get back, making it home could be a white-knuckle ride. There are no fumes to run on in an EV, and no fuel light to ignore.

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EV dealer maintenance is both less of a hassle than if you drove an internal-combustion vehicle and more of a necessity. Electrification eliminates many wear-and-tear issues, or at least mitigates them. According to Nancy Gioia, director of global electrification at Ford, a San Francisco cab company using Ford Escape Hybrids went from changing brake pads every 10,000 miles to every 50,000 miles (regenerative braking absorbs most of the car's kinetic energy before the pads engage). Oil changes disappear in EVs, and even in plug-in hybrids oil-filter changes could be reduced by a factor of five or 10.

But as mechanical failures become less of an issue, baby-sitting the expensive, complex and potentially explosive battery pack requires a new approach to maintenance. GEVs will regularly assess and wirelessly transmit battery-health updates to dealers or mechanics, in the same way that modern jet aircraft can send maintenance alerts to ground crews while in midair. Nissan is currently setting up its own global data center to manage this information, and GM expects to use its OnStar telematics system to do the same.

That's why you're on your way to the dealer--to check on the battery's health and, more importantly, to take advantage of an invitation to try a firmware update, which should optimize the EV's battery pack, expanding your range by 5 percent. Missing this visit could mean waiting months for the software's full release. There are thousands of apps for GEVs, most of them changing the way vehicles handle data. But tweaking the algorithms and code at the heart of the car's performance takes an authorized mechanic.

In fact, the EV revolution eventually could deal the final blow for automotive DIY. "For the do-it-yourself mechanics, without having a tie-in to the infrastructure or the systems that allow you to talk to the car, it's going to get more difficult to diagnose and address the electrified vehicle's needs," Ford's Gioia says. Those dead set on modding their GEVs will have to contend with the usual voided warranties, plus new risks associated with high-voltage equipment and battery cells that can detonate when overheated. But the true gearheads aren't exactly dinosaurs--with more than 280 million nonelectric cars in the country in 2020, there's still plenty of axle grease and hydraulic fluid to go around.

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You barely have time to pick out a magazine in the dealership's waiting room before the tests are finished. Back on the road, you notice the battery gauge has taken a sudden nose-dive to 40 percent. The tests they ran at the dealership sucked out what little safety margin you might have had. If the work chargers are still cut off, there are only a couple of options for getting home: Either stop at the mall and kill a few hours while the car sits in a complimentary charging spot, or get to a fast charger.

By the end of 2010, the Department of Energy will have installed 50 Level 3 fast chargers, each running at 50 kilowatts, in the San Diego area. Theoretically, the presence of fast chargers can reduce the so-called range anxiety that keeps EV drivers from pushing the limits of their battery range. In an ongoing study that began in 2007, the installation of a handful of Level 3 chargers in Japan encouraged participants to drive their EVs as much as 80 percent more often, and 30 percent farther from their homes. In fact, almost none of the subjects actually used the fast chargers--the high-voltage, high-priced equipment is as much a psychological tool as it is a piece of electric transportation infrastructure.

But as Mark Duvall, the Electric Power Research Institute's director of electric transportation, points out, it's hard to come up with a worse investment than a $50,000 charger that no one uses. (Public Level 2 chargers run $5000 to $10,000.) One key reason drivers might be avoiding fast chargers: Twenty minutes is still way too long to wait. To get charging times down to 5 minutes--more than the average gas station fill-up, but not by much--means installing chargers capable of 250- to 600-kw output. On paper, the numbers add up just fine: More kilowatts mean faster recharge rates. Even sticking with the math, though, ultrafast charging becomes an unwieldy and even frightening prospect. "For 5-minute charging, you've got to go to 600 kw," says Don Hillebrand, director of the Center for Transportation Research at Argonne National Laboratory. "That's how much power you put in a city block." With that sort of industrial-strength output, capacitors could take 20 minutes to recover between charges, provided the utilities would even allow such stations access to the grid.

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Proponents of fast charging see distributed storage as the key to making the technology feasible. "You can populate L.A. with 250-kw chargers and have 250-kwh storage units right there with them," says Kristen Helsel, vice president of EV solutions at AeroVironment. "As you take power from the grid, you can put it back in." These stationary batteries could be charged by solar power or off-peak grid electricity, or by something more innovative, such as hydrogen fuel cell generators.

Whether or not anyone would commit to that level of capital investment, the physics still gets in the way. "Batteries don't like getting hot," Hillebrand says. Even if a new generation of batteries could survive years of fast charging, a hardware failure during a Level 3 charge could be fatal for nearby humans. "People don't think about the phenomenal amount of heat generated when you move that much energy that fast," Hillebrand says. "When you look at dealing with potential arcs and thermal events, I don't see it as even remotely possible by 2020. And our guys are the ones who write the standards for these chargers."

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The fast charger you pull up to is the more common 50-kw variety. It's located in a desolate spot in Sun Valley, a drive-through kiosk in the parking lot of an industrial metal supplier. Even at 50 kw, handling a steady stream of demand at this wattage requires industrial-capacity transformers and is more profitable for businesses already paying commercial electricity rates. As you wait for the two cars ahead of you to juice up, you see an attendant brave the 100-plus-degree heat to tape a paper sign over the kiosk's price-per-kwh display. Fast charging already runs 10 times what you pay off-peak at home. As of right now, legal or not, the price of an emergency charge just tripled to $30.

A public-minded Samaritan might realize the grid is already reaching its breaking point, head back to work and ask for a ride home or to the nearest Zipcar. Naturally, you drive to the fast charger and, in 20 minutes, suck almost as much electricity into your car as the average house consumes in a day.

Electric vehicles aren't going to bring down grids around the country simply because of increased demand. A more realistic threat lies in the uneven distribution of GEV ownership. Just as hybrids like the Toyota Prius tend to show up more commonly in certain types of neighborhoods, experts expect a clustering effect for plug-in vehicles. Tease apart these demographic pockets and you might find a concentration of liberal, environmentally conscious types, or simply cost-conscious drivers who live 30 to 40 miles from the nearest city. In some areas, such as Austin, Texas; Chicago; and along the West Coast, it's likely that multiple GEVs will soon be pulling into garages on the same street.

Even if you assume that Level 3 fast chargers will be rare, and that the owners of public chargers will allow utilities to remotely disable or delay charging with load-control signals, the majority of Level 2 chargers will remain in the hands of individual GEV owners. Some will likely agree to load control, and most will charge during the cheapest, off-peak hours. But some home chargers will come on at exactly the wrong time, in all the wrong, highly clustered places.

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At 6 pm, you make it home, and become part of the problem. There are reports of transformers going down in L.A. If the power goes out overnight, you could be on an even longer fast-charger line tomorrow, assuming it hasn't been actively shut down. So you disable the off-peak charging mode and start tanking up immediately. And since the default rate of charge is the maximum, your home charger is suddenly draining 19 kw of electricity, almost four times your normal draw.

Within 15 minutes, two other drivers on your street are doing the same. In the typical neighborhood, each transformer supplies power to five to 10 houses. And typically, this circuit's GEVs draw 3 to 6 kw apiece. Tonight, it's not the capacity of the transformer that matters, anyway. "Transformers are designed to run up to 50 percent above capacity for short periods," says Philip Gott, director for automotive consulting at IHS Global Insight, a Massachusetts-based forecasting firm. "As long as you allow a transformer to cool down at night, it can run like that for 20, 30 years." But Gott notes that too many GEVs charging at night would mean those transformers won't get their off-peak cool-down. Add a heat storm, with temperatures dropping only slightly overnight, and the stage is set for a scattered but significant infrastructure meltdown.

Sometime around 7 PM, the house goes dark. Your mobile phone flashes on--it's an alert from the garage charger that the vehicle's battery has stopped charging at 81 percent. Across Southern California, in neighborhoods where GEVs are popular, and in some urban areas where not a single vehicle is plugged into the grid, another handful of transformers has blown. There are plenty of GEV owners whose lights are still on, customers who agreed to load-control intervention by their utility. And in Burbank, there's a pilot program of pure EVs that are actually serving as distributed backup batteries, pushing power back into the house and out into the local grid. This is called vehicle-to-grid charging, or V2G, and in 2020, it's still a decade or more from widespread adoption.

What's far more common in 2020 is V2H charging, or vehicle-to-home. Instead of wheeling a carbon-monoxide-belching generator out into the backyard for emergency power, GEV owners can simply draw electricity from the vehicle's battery. Provided the home is wired for backup power, and depending on the size of the home and the capacity of the battery, V2H charging could be a seamless backup system for the entire house, or a direct power source, via plenty of extension cords, for specific air conditioners, refrigerators and other appliances.

Your home is fully V2H-ready, and with your partially charged EV plugged into the house, the lights, the fridge and the a/c are all back on. The news is reporting blackouts across the state. In the days and weeks to come, some analysts will claim that electric cars played a part, however small. Residential chargers and fast-charging stations that didn't sign up for load control will be singled out. The utilities will push even harder to get customers in line, adjusting electricity rates to further penalize peak charging and reward off-peak.

The smart grid will be seen as a success and a failure, depending on whom you ask. On a national level, there's no single solution to be gleaned, just as there's no single problem that led to California's blackouts--GEV adoption will be different in every state, and each grid will handle electric vehicles differently. The only clear lesson is that the transition from liquid fuel to battery cells has not been as smooth or as painless as promised.

For tonight, as midnight approaches, and the power rolls on and off across California, your home is running just fine. The car's battery will be wiped out by morning, but no matter. That's what the six-year-old gas guzzler sitting next to it is for.